In An American Brothel, Amanda Boczar considers sexual encounters between American servicemen and civilians throughout the Vietnam War, and she places those fraught and sometimes violent meetings in the context of the US military and diplomatic campaigns. In 1966, US Senator J. William Fulbright declared that "Saigon has become an American brothel." Concerned that, as US military involvement in Vietnam increased so, too, had prostitution, black market economies, and a drug trade fueled by American dollars, Fulbright decried an arrogance of power on the part of Americans and the corrosive effects unchecked immorality could have on Vietnam as well as on the war effort. The symbol, at home and abroad, of the sweeping social and cultural changes was often the so-called South Vietnamese bar girl. As the war progressed, peaking in 1968 with more than half a million troops engaged, the behavior of soldiers off the battlefield started to impact affect the conflict more broadly. Beyond the brothel, shocking revelations of rapes and the increase in marriage applications complicated how the South Vietnamese and American allies cooperated and managed social behavior. Strictures on how soldiers conducted themselves during rest and relaxation time away from battle further eroded morale of disaffected servicemen. The South Vietnamese were loath to loosen moral restrictions and feared deleterious influence of a permissive wWestern culture on their society. From the consensual to the coerced, sexual encounters shaped the Vietnam War. Boczar shows that these encounters—sometimes facilitated and sometimes banned by the US military command—restructured the South Vietnamese economy, captivated international attention, dictated military policies, and hung over diplomatic relations during and after the war.
In An American Brothel, Amanda Boczar considers sexual encounters between American servicemen and civilians throughout the Vietnam War, and she places those fraught and sometimes violent meetings in the context of the US military and diplomatic campaigns. In 1966, US Senator J. William Fulbright declared that "Saigon has become an American brothel." Concerned that, as US military involvement in Vietnam increased so, too, had prostitution, black market economies, and a drug trade fueled by American dollars, Fulbright decried an arrogance of power on the part of Americans and the corrosive effects unchecked immorality could have on Vietnam as well as on the war effort. The symbol, at home and abroad, of the sweeping social and cultural changes was often the so-called South Vietnamese bar girl. As the war progressed, peaking in 1968 with more than half a million troops engaged, the behavior of soldiers off the battlefield started to impact affect the conflict more broadly. Beyond the brothel, shocking revelations of rapes and the increase in marriage applications complicated how the South Vietnamese and American allies cooperated and managed social behavior. Strictures on how soldiers conducted themselves during rest and relaxation time away from battle further eroded morale of disaffected servicemen. The South Vietnamese were loath to loosen moral restrictions and feared deleterious influence of a permissive wWestern culture on their society. From the consensual to the coerced, sexual encounters shaped the Vietnam War. Boczar shows that these encounters—sometimes facilitated and sometimes banned by the US military command—restructured the South Vietnamese economy, captivated international attention, dictated military policies, and hung over diplomatic relations during and after the war.
The cliche is that prostitution is the oldest profession. Isn't it time that the subject received a full reference treatment? This major 2-volume set is the first to treat in an inclusive reference what is usually considered a societal failing and the underside of sexuality and economic survival. The A-to-Z encyclopedia offers wide-ranging entries related to prostitution and the sex industry, past and present, both worldwide (mostly in the West) and in the United States. The topic of prostitution has high-interest appeal across disciplines, and the narrative entries illuminate literature, art, law, medicine, economics, politics, women's studies, religion, sociology, sexuality, film, popular culture, public health, nonfiction, American and world history, business, gender, media, education, crime, race, technology, performing arts, family, social work, social mores, pornography, the military, tourism, child labor, and more. It is targeted to the general reader, who will gain useful insight into the human race through time via its sex industry and prostitution. An introduction overviews the scope of prostitution from the earliest historical records, including the Bible. User-friendly lists that are alphabetically and topically arranged help the reader find entries of interest, as does the comprehensive index. A chronology proffers significant dates related to the topic. Each entry is signed and has suggestions for further reading. Sample entries: Abolition; Actresses; Augustine, Saint; Barr, Candy; Bible; Camp Followers; Chamberlain-Kahn Bill of 1918; Child Prostitution; Clothing, Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869; Crime; Debby Doesn't Do It for Free; Dickens, Charles; Devadasi; Entrapment; Fallen Woman Trope; Feminism; Films, Cult; Five Points; Free Love; Geisha; Globalization; Guidebooks; Hip-Hop; HIV/AIDS and the Prostitution Rights Movement; Human Rights; Incest; Internet; Jack the Ripper; Kama Sutra; League of Nations; Lulu; Male Stripping; Mann Act; Mayhew, Henry; Memoirs; Migration and Mobility; Nazi Germany; Poetry; Purity Movements; R&R; Religion; Salvation Army; Scapegoating; Slang; Storyville; Temporary Marriage; Unions; Venice; Window Prostitution.
Whether in mainstream or independent films, depictions of female prostitution and promiscuity are complicated by their intersection with male fantasies. In such films, issues of exploitation, fidelity, and profitability are often introduced into the narrative, where sex and power become commodities traded between men and women. In Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn, Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Catriona McAvoy have assembled essays that explore the representation of women and sexual transactions in film and television. Included in these discussions are the films Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Eyes Wide Shut, L.A. Confidential, Pandora’s Box, and Shame and such programs as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gigolos. By exploring the themes of class differences and female economic independence, the chapters go beyond textual analysis and consider politics, censorship, social trends, laws, race, and technology, as well as sexual and gender stereotypes. By exploring this complex subject, Selling Sex on Screen offers a spectrum of representations of desire and sexuality through the moving image. This volume will be of interest not only to students and scholars of film but also researchers in gender studies, women’s studies, criminology, sociology, film studies, adaptation studies, and popular culture.
The period 1885 to 1917 saw thousands of American crusaders working hard to "save the fallen women," but little on the part of American social protest writers. In this first work on the subject, Laura Hapke examines how writers attempted to turn an outcast into a heroine in a literature otherwise known for its puritanical attitude toward the fallen woman. She focuses on how these authors (all male) expressed late-Victorian conflicts about female sexuality. If, as they all maintained, women have an innate preference for chastity, how could they account for the prostitute? Was she a sinner, suggesting the potential waywardness of all women? Or, if she was a victim, what of her "depravity"? Hapke reevaluates Crane's famous Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, discusses neglected prostitution fiction by authors Joaquin Miller, Edgar Fawcett, and Harold Frederic, and surveys Progressive white slave novels. She draws on a number of period sources, among them urban guidebooks and medical treatises, to place the fiction in its cultural context.
What started out as a simple trip to a postcard fair turned into a lifelong investigation for author Robert Flynn Johnson. Captivated by the beauty and originality of a group of nineteenth-century photographs of women, he had to know more. Now, nearly a decade after his first encounter with the images, Johnson has uncovered more than two hundred vintage photographs of women who lived and worked at a brothel in Reading, Pennsylvania, circa 1892. Taken by commercial photographer William Goldman, the photographs paint a full picture of the environment that the women inhabited--from inside the brothel, posing artistically for the camera, to their off-duty routines, such as reading, smoking, and bathing. Never-before published and taken two decades before the famous E. J. Bellocq photographs of prostitutes in Storyville in New Orleans circa 1913, these beautifully produced photographs are only now seeing the light of day. Johnson uses these photographs to detail their aesthetic, historical, and sociological importance in the history of photography, examining them alongside paintings and photographs by such artists as Degas, Picasso, Atget, and more. Accompanied by essays from Professor Ruth Rosen and Dennita Sewell that provide an insightful historical overview of these images in context of the period in which they were taken and a preface from famed burlesque dancer Dita von Teese, this volume provides a personal visual record of lives of these women while also offering a deeper understanding of the Working Girls that existed more than 120 years ago.
This case study explores the operation of a brothel community in Frontier City, Mexico during a period of economic prosperity (1969-1972). Participant observation provides a typology of the major forms of prostitution practiced and the characteristics of the clientele (American, Mexican-American, Mexican) are discussed. The literature on prostitution is fairly extensive and this monograph is intended to add to those portions of it that favor a sociological interpretation of an ancient social institution. The research for this study was conducted more than two decades1 ago and is now being released for publication since it is highly unlikely that I (or anyone else) would now be able to recognize any of the hundreds of prostitutes and their clients that I interacted with during 1969-1972/Summer: 1974--much less for me to be able to release discrediting information that may cause them harm of any kind. As a further precaution I assigned fictitious names to all of my informants (including Evangelina) in the process of transcribing my field notes. This was necessary because La Zona also serves as a center for night life and underworld recreation. illicit deals, contraband was touted, and sometimes agents of social control (police, assorted officials) and otherwise respectable citizens of both Mexico and the U.S. were observed in situations which would tarnish their reputations and conventional identities, and certain military personnel - just by being on-site, or by living in Mexico - were breaking military regulations. As a double safeguard I then took the fictitious names and, for the most part, eliminated them entirely by specifying the context of the interaction. For those irritated by the phrases according to informants and an informant said, I apologize. While this may seem a bit paranoid - and it is somewhat awkward - it must be noted that the Mexican government did not authorize my research and the keen reader of footnotes will discover that the risks of being identified as one freely talking to the American asking questions are not imaginary. The danger lies in being misidentified as a tool of the police, or the underworld, since both have contacts on the scene. when dealing with U.S./Mexico border crossing inspectors and the on-site Mexican police who engage in routine searches for weapons and suspicious materials.The initial field research was conducted when I was in my early to mid-twenties--without benefit of any form of sponsorship, research grants, or official recognition--and was an important part of my forming a professional identity as a sociologist. While the research served as an ethnographic rite of passage for me, premature release of the study could have generated controversy and proved damaging for those who had become part of my extended family (many of whom were still active on La Zona or currently in the American military). Moreover, the political and media climates of the times favored the superficial exposure of cosmetic issues internal to Mexico, i.e., drug busts, street shoot-outs, and corruption which, while real enough, often understate--and possibly deflect--the importance of overriding U.S. interests. certain kinds of deviance research and the cutbacks in funding at many universities in the eighties saw labyrinthine administrative requirements in the area of human subjects research grow in direct proportion to the dwindling amounts of funds available. At best, the study of social deviance was losing some of the luster it had acquired in the late sixties and, at worst, there were growing suspicions--according to detractors--that deviance research, itself, was a questionable activity since such study was perceived as either being irrelevant to imagined larger issues--which were increasingly seen as exclusively the result of political contests of one kind or another - or that such study, of necessity, would serve to reinforce a particular status quo. tendentiousness which is antithetical to the conduct of any actual research: either one's subjects must be shown to experience the requisite amounts of victimization, false consciousness, or oppression so as to make the research liberating (and, hence, unnecessary, since this conclusion is known before the data are gathered), or the inside story of the life-world of one's subjects is assumed to be so fragile that it must not be made public lest they become further discredited than they already are. In any event, I did not want to muddle my fledgling academic career in controversy2, so I used my materials from La Zona in classroom lectures over the years and pursued other areas of research until my field notes acquired a wholesome shade of yellow--and were thus harmless. What results is a study of those structural features of La Zona that make the social meaning of the practice of prostitution--as experienced by clients and the women themselves--clearest in the eyes of an outside observer. A few caveats, however, are in order. that, in fact, a period of prosperity characterized the years 1969-1972. This was only apparent when I returned in the summer of 1974. It is important to mention, however, that during 1969-1972 the Mexican peso traded at roughly seven to the U.S. dollar; the Vietnam War was being waged; there was no gasoline shortage; the local bull ring was typically packed to capacity on the weekends; during rush hours one could walk across the International Bridge faster (in either direction) than traffic could proceed, and it would be a decade before AIDS would receive substantial public attention. Second, I was very close in age to most of my informants and also unmarried. This facilitated a range of social contacts that would have been quite difficult to both experience and achieve had a larger number of years--and social statuses - separated me from those with whom I regularly socialized and recreated. For example: hitching a ride to and from Mexico - and La Zona - allowed me to capture the impressions of the journey common to both prostitutes and clients who were age-peers. on both sides of the border limit such activities to the young. I experienced friends, colleagues or objectionable folks and settings, depending on the circumstances, which became a subject matter only in the process of writing. Thus, many taken-for-granted gestures, impressions and ways of behaving, e.g., being almost totally innocent of risks, were not initially seen as problematic. At another level, prostitution embodies the essence of sexism - without which the institution could not survive, much less flourish. Yet, in everyday interaction, both on and off-site, the prostitutes refer to themselves as the girls - in part, due to cultural conventions; in part, because some are not yet adults; in part, because the word prostitute is an outsider's term and is never used as a form of self-referral. This, at times, produces politically incorrect prose. While I defer to, and appreciate, norms governing non-sexist language wherever possible, I should note (to linguists and others) that this polite convention strains credulity in a setting, which is characterized by racist and sexist contours. or to break the monotony of the region, fashion a language shared by their social peers--whatever the larger society may dictate. For example, no prostitute on La Zona conceives of herself euphemistically as a sex worker - no matter how much those in certain academic circles may wish this to be so - and virtually all prostitutes refer to a large percentage of men as boys. Moreover, affectionate monikers which are conventionally applied only to significant others, i.e., my love; my hero; dear; honey; my only one; are part of the general vocabulary of intimacy that surrounds settings where prostitution is practiced. Such verbiage is decidedly left at the door when the work-role ends. Intimate language is truly shared only among a small circle of confidants - or may be mentioned (along with Mexican curse words and certain forms of slang) in a joking manner
